Tag: Seamless Mobility

Our cities are not taking the lead. On the surface everyone talks about a smart city and a new generation of public transportation, but in practice most cities are dragged into this revolution rather than actually lead it.

Transportation companies do not represent the city’s residents. Uber for example considers (at best) the interests of its drivers and passengers. From its perspective, other public transports and pedestrians are considered as a nuisance or worse, as competition. It would have been easier for Uber if those two were not part of the public space.

These days, most of the cities that deal with smart city projects and new types of transportation do not initiate solutions. Most of them are simply following on proposed business solutions. Uber, Lyft, Bird and other companies spread their transportation networks in the city with minimal coordination or without any coordination at all. At present, no one stands to represent the pedestrians and the residents of the city in front of these transportation companies, resulting in the chaos we see today .

If you had to plan the urban transport system from scratch today, would it look the way it does now? Probably not. The key to good public transportation is Seamless Mobility – a user experience so great that the passenger hardly noticed the vehicles he rides or the road. An experience tailored to the transportation solution I have suggested in the previous article.

If you had to plan the urban transport system from scratch today, would it look the way it does now? probably not. Urban transportation planning suffers from a mental fixation and I invite you to take a step back with me and rethink about how it should be conducted. In my opinion, the IT systems we have today can lead to a new type of transport, one that is not defined by Nodes and Modes.

If you had to plan the urban transport system from scratch today, would it look the way it does now? This is a question that mayors, opinion leaders and entrepreneurs insist on not asking. Everyone plays the same familiar game of transportation and ‘moves the cheese’ only slightly each time. Urban transportation planning is fixated about modes and nodes. In fact … if there is anything more conservative than city transportation planning it is the design of the cars that travel in it.